Stonemouth by Iain Banks Read Free Book Online Page B

thirties, had its heyday then and in the fifties – it was closed for most of the Second World War – went to seed in the sixties, fell into disrepair in the seventies and eighties, was closed during the nineties and got refurbished with Millennium lottery money in 1999, opening in the spring of 2000. It became the cool new place to hang out, especially if you were too young to drink. Too young to drink without getting hassled all the time, anyway.
    My first unambiguous memory of the girl was at the Lido, during one of those glorious, mist-discovered days: her, just out of the pool, taking off a bathing cap, her head tipped just so, releasing a long fawn fall of hair the colour of wet sand, swinging out.
    Her swimming costume was one-piece, black; her legs looked like they’d stretch into different time zones when she lay down, and her face was just this vision of blissed serenity. I remember the distant keening of the gulls, and the shush of waves breaking outside against the Lido walls, and the smell of swimming pool. I remember the radiance of those long, honey-coloured limbs, glowing in the late golden-red of the afternoon sun.
    Thinking back, she was as straight-up-and-down as a boy and had almost nothing up top apart from broad, swimmer’s shoulders, but there was enough there to hint at what was to come, to let you know this was a girl still about to become a young woman. She moved with the sort of grace that makes you think everybody else must be made out of Lego.
    She saw me looking at her. She smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, and it certainly wasn’t a come-on smile, but it was the easiest, most natural one I’d ever seen.
    I was fifteen. She was a year younger. She’d gone before I recovered the composure even to think of actually talking to her. I wouldn’t see her again for nearly a year, wouldn’t touch her or really talk to her for over another twelve months beyond that, and our first kiss was even further over the horizon, lost in the mists, but I knew then that we belonged together. I wanted her. More than that: Iwanted to be wanted by her. More than that, too: I needed her to be part of my life, the major part. I was that certain, just with that look, that smile.
    It seems crazy now. It seemed crazy then – you can’t decide you’ve found your life’s desire, your sole soulmate on the strength of a glance, on the swing of some hair, whether you’re fifteen or fifty – but when something like that hits, you don’t have much choice. I was barely more than a kid and scarcely able to think straight enough to know something like that, but I
felt
it: the impulsive, cast-in-iron, decision-making part of my being presented this as a stone-cold unshakeable certainty, valid in perpetuity from this point on, before, it felt, my rational, conscious mind could get a chance to think on it or even comment; every part of me apart from my brain got together and told the grey-pink hemispherical bits that this was just the way it was.
    I didn’t even say anything to my friends, though some said they saw a change in me from then on. Hindsight, maybe. Maybe not.
    Hindsight. What we all wouldn’t give …
    Yeah, well.
    ‘Weird, isn’t it? All these years flying in and out of Dyce on family holidays and such, and I never made the connection with throwing dice, and dicing with death, and shit like that. It was always just where you flew from if you lived up here on the cold shoulder of Scotland. Wonder if the name gives nervous flyers the cold sweats?’
    ‘Well done, Stewart, you’ve discovered homonyms.’
    ‘
Homonymphs
?’
    Ferg looks at me, suspicious but uncertain. I flap one hand against his shoulder. ‘Ha ha, just kidding.’
    We’re in The Howf now, our other regular drinking hole from the old days, closer to the docks and the rough end of town. The Howf has kept the same name for nearly half a century, so it can be done. It had a garden – who knew? – or at least a sloped bit of yard at the